René Descartes

Descartes laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well. His best known philosophical statement is "Cogito ergo sum" (French: Je pense, donc je suis; I think, therefore I am), found in part IV of Discourse on the Method (1637 – written in French but with inclusion of "Cogito ergo sum") and §7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (1644 – written in Latin). Early life[edit] Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine (now Descartes), Indre-et-Loire, France. When he was one year old, his mother Jeanne Brochard died. In his book, Discourse On The Method, he says "I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Visions[edit] Work[edit] Descartes lived on Westermarkt 6 (on the left)

Catherine of AragonCatherine of Aragon was the youngest surviving child of Ferdinand and Isabella, the joint rulers of Spain, and as was common for princesses of the day, her parents almost immediately began looking for a political match for her. When she was three year old, she was betrothed to Arthur, the son of Henry VII of England. Arthur was not even quite two at the time. When she was almost 16, in 1501, Catherine made the journey to England. It took her three months, and her ships weathered several storms, but she safely made landfall at Plymouth on October 2, 1501. Catherine and Arthur were married on 14 November 1501 in Old St.

A Japanese Soldier Who Continued Fighting WWII 29 Years After the Japanese Surrendered, Because He Didn’t KnowToday I Found Out about a Japanese soldier who continued fighting World War II a full 29 years after the Japanese surrendered, because he didn’t know the war was over. Hiroo Onoda is a Japanese citizen that originally worked at a Chinese trading company. When he was 20 years old, he was called to join the Japanese army.Jean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques Rousseau (/ruːˈsoʊ/;[1] French: [ʒɑ̃ʒak ʁuso]; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological, and educational thought. Biography[edit] Youth[edit] Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy. Since 1536, Geneva had been a Huguenot republic and the seat of Calvinism.

WHAT DO PHILOSOPHERS BELIEVE?The Visual CV: in a career spanning half a century, Sir Tom Courtenay has gone from a new-wave warrior to a grand old man, via a fool or two (usually called Norman). Irving Wardle picks his best roles on stage and screen From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2013 1960 The SeagullArriving on the London stage as a RADA graduate from the fish docks of Hull, Tom Courtenay achieved overnight fame as Chekhov’s Konstantin. This was a time when British audiences were used to seeing Konstantin as a lyrically romantic juvenile. What they saw in the 23-year-old Courtenay was a shabby, flat-vowelled malcontent whose filial conflict with Judith Anderson’s queenly Arkadina went beyond the play to dramatise the theatrical war then blazing between the new wave and the old guard.

Dualism (philosophy of mind)René Descartes's illustration of dualism. Inputs are passed on by the sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit. In philosophy of mind, dualism is the position that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical,[1] or that the mind and body are not identical.[2] Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism, in the mind–body problem.[1][2] Ontological dualism makes dual commitments about the nature of existence as it relates to mind and matter, and can be divided into three different types: Substance dualism asserts that mind and matter are fundamentally distinct kinds of substances.[1]Property dualism suggests that the ontological distinction lies in the differences between properties of mind and matter (as in emergentism).[1]Predicate dualism claims the irreducibility of mental predicates to physical predicates.[1]

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of SalisburyLife[edit] He was the son of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley and Mildred Cooke. His half-brother was Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of Exeter and philosopher Francis Bacon was his first cousin. Cecil attended St John's College, Cambridge in the 1580s, but did not take a degree.[1][2] He also attended "disputations" at the Sorbonne.[3] In 1584 he sat for the first time in the House of Commons, representing his birthplace, the borough of Westminster.A tribute to Prince Charles, champion of anti-science, on his 65th birthdayToday, Prince Charles celebrates his 65th birthday. He is one of the world’s most tenacious, outspoken and influential proponent of alternative medicine and attacker of science - sufficient reason, I think, to join the birthday-celebrations by outlining a chronology of his love affair with quackery. The following post highlights just a few events (there are so many more!) which I happen to find interesting. As I was personally involved in several of them, I have tried to stay as close as possible to the text published by journalists at the time (with links to the originals); this, I thought, was fairer than providing my own, possibly biased interpretations. The origins Charles’ passion for all things alternative are not difficult to trace.

Arne NæssArne Dekke Eide Næss (AR-nə NASS;[note 1] 27 January 1912 – 12 January 2009) was a Norwegian philosopher who coined the term deep ecology and was an important intellectual and inspirational figure within the environmental movement of the late twentieth century.[6] Næss cited Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring as being a key influence in his vision of deep ecology. Næss combined his ecological vision with Gandhian nonviolence and on several occasions participated in direct action. Næss averred that while western environmental groups of the early post-war period had raised public awareness of the environmental issues of the time, they had largely failed to have insight into and address what he argued were the underlying cultural and philosophical background to these problems.

Pick of the week: Noam Chomsky and Michel Gondry, together at lastHow does one explain the fact that a leading figure in analytic philosophy and linguistic theory – abstruse academic fields that are not readily comprehensible to the layperson and have almost no practical or everyday resonance – has become America’s most prominent public intellectual and its leading anarcho-libertarian voice of dissent? Needless to say, most people who have read Noam Chomsky’s numerous works of political polemics about American imperialism, the mass media and the Middle East have not read “Language and the Study of Mind,” let alone “Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew.” But there is a relationship between the two Chomskys, and also a person behind them, whom almost nobody knows. That impossible combination is what French filmmaker Michel Gondry sets out to capture, after his own peculiar fashion, in “Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?: An Animated Conversation With Noam Chomsky.”

50 Life Secrets and TipsMemorize something everyday.Not only will this leave your brain sharp and your memory functioning, you will also have a huge library of quotes to bust out at any moment. Poetry, sayings and philosophies are your best options.Constantly try to reduce your attachment to possessions.Those who are heavy-set with material desires will have a lot of trouble when their things are taken away from them or lost. Possessions do end up owning you, not the other way around.Quantum entanglementQuantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently – instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole. Such phenomena were the subject of a 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen,[1] describing what came to be known as the EPR paradox, and several papers by Erwin Schrödinger shortly thereafter.[2][3] Einstein and others considered such behavior to be impossible, as it violated the local realist view of causality (Einstein referred to it as "spooky action at a distance"),[4] and argued that the accepted formulation of quantum mechanics must therefore be incomplete. History[edit] However, they did not coin the word entanglement, nor did they generalize the special properties of the state they considered. Concept[edit]